Tuesday, January 18, 2011

Watercolor Child Portrait Finished

C'est fini! And I am really proud of this one.  It's called "Quilted" and I actually made the quilt wrapped around my son. I wish more of it showed because it was a cat design that caught my eye about 8 years ago. It was paper pieced and took many hours. I've only made a few quilts and this one had a gazillion pieces and tons of quilting. I will definitely try to use it in a future painting.

Each painting is a learning experience. I have learned quite a bit about working with earth colors lately. This painting was much more subdued than others that I've done. I wanted to go darker and I also stayed true to the quilt colors. Lots of raw and burnt umber mixed with ultramarine blue. Raw umber is a very handy color. I use it a lot in hair and I actually used a similar painting technique on the quilt as I do with hair. Basically you're working dry in wet and layering and building the colors up light to dark. I also did a little wet in wet but not sloppy wet so I could control it some. This way you get soft edges.

For the background I took advantage of the paint (raw umber mostly). It's a granulating pigment so you're bound to get some flecks of paint that settle. I let it react with my damp background and do what it wanted to. I also painted the sofa while the background was dark hence the crazy edges. I love it. My husband hates it. But I told him it's better to leave those things than keep going back over and making a mess. Blooms and backwashes can be beautiful things .... It's art after all.

Thursday, January 13, 2011

Watercolor Portrait On My Easel


This is a painting of my son. So far it's going pretty smoothly. I wanted a lose background and I think I achieved that. I think it's important to have a variety of edges both soft and hard. Even though I am using a photograph for a reference, I don't want it to look that obvious. The hard part (face) is done and now it's just figuring out how to paint the quilt he's wrapped in. Actually, that may be the hard part. I will post the finish in a few days.

Monday, January 10, 2011

Illustration Friday "Deja Vu"

Illustration Monday for me! We had a snow day today so I stayed home from work and though I spent most of the day in my studio, I didn't get as much done as I wanted to, seemed to take forever getting my next painting ready to paint, but tomorrow I will be ready to get my brushes out. 

My interpretation of Deja Vu.

Wednesday, January 05, 2011

Aquarium Collage

This is a fun project I put together for a class I'm taking. It started with a paperclip. I used mostly my own collage paper made with acrylic paint on rice paper. The seaweed is some scrapbook paper I had been saving for just the right project.

This year I'm planning on focusing more on illustration and I did this project with children's illustration in the back of my mind.


Drippy Daffodils

6 x 6 in. watercolor on Aquabord Daffodils are one of my favorite flowers and dozens of little clusters have been appearing in my yard s...